2003 was the year with Gentoo written all over it in the Linux universe. Last year was Ubuntu's & MEPIS'. I believe that Arch Linux's year is the current one. Read more for a comparison of Arch to existing distributions, and why we think it rocks and where we think it still requires some work.

My brother installed Arch on his system. It seems to be very responsive & quick (compared to Mandrake, Suse, Redhat). Speed is what it has going for it (based on viewing it in operation). Installs fast (25 minutes or less) (probably installs less packages than other distros). Lean, efficient packages (not bloated). Sum up - Speed!

The way you achieve this (and the way I do it) is to only install the base packages on an FTP install, then on reboot use pacman to add X and your WM etc, and then go from there in a piece-meal fashion - to that extent it's "un-bloated".